Personal Essays and Family History

And now, my beloved bretheren, all those who are of the house of Israel, and all ye ends of the earth, I speak unto you as the voice of one crying from the dust: Farewell until that great day shall come.

So writes the prophet Nephi in 2 Nephi 33, verse 13.

In this chapter he bears a powerful testimony of the value of the records he keeps. He expresses the hope that they would be preserved, and be found valuable to us in the latter days.

We, you and I, will never write scripture.

But I testify to you with the same assurance that Nephi testifies to us that what we write will speak to those who follow us as a “voice of one crying from the dust.” We may not speak to millions; we may speak only to those of our descendants who do family history and bother to dust off the crack open the paper and electronic files they find with our names on them. But we do speak.

I have many photos of my father, from those taken of him and his brother as boys at their Dutch village school, to a photo I have of him on my desk at work, where he poses next to his beloved 1948 Ford pickup.

But the things of his I value the most are the words he wrote. Some were written to me, in the form of letters and father’s blessings. Others were written to the family at large. But in his words I hear his voice and feel his love.

And he was not an educated man – his formal schooling stopped at the equivalent of the sixth grade, due to World War II. And English is not his native language.

But in his beautiful script, learned at that Dutch school, I can hear his hopes for his children, his love for his children. His love and hopes for me.

Don’t think of writing as something you do to pass a class – like this one.

Don’t think of writing as something you’ll do now, but never again.

Writing things down is how we communicate with those who come after us. And while we can communicate through photos and recordings and video, what we record in writing carries more of our voice, more of ourselves, more of our loves and cares and dreams, than any other medium.

So please write. Write for yourself, your children, your future children. Don’t write just for me or for any other instructor – because we won’t remember what you’ve written, to be honest. Your descendants, however, will.

Drown them in your writing, no matter how trivial it may seem. Someone down the line will enjoy reading the things you write. They’ll enjoy hearing your voice out of the dust, even if you’re around and not so dusty.